


when namaari sees raya

by IridescentDrream



Category: Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)
Genre: Disney is a coward, F/F, fixing their shit and giving us the love story we deserved, namaari is gay as hell for raya
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 23:34:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30012678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IridescentDrream/pseuds/IridescentDrream
Summary: In which Namaari and Raya get the love story they deserved
Relationships: Namaari & Raya (Disney)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 219





	when namaari sees raya

_“I don't even know one thing about you but give me everything about you. It's only been a moment, it's true, but I could never live this life without you. I could never live without you. Doesn't matter where I go, doesn't matter if I run. We were always going to get too close, we were always going to fall in love…”_

_\- Without You, Parachute_

* * *

The first time Namaari sees Raya, she is glowing.

Heart is not so different from her own beloved Fang, but everything feels different here. She has never been so far away from home for so long, and she is racing to take everything in – the looming rock face that rises up before her with its carved hollow, the chirping of the insects in the swaying grasses, the flash of multicoloured fabrics as four nations converge on one.

It’s hard to do when her tunic keeps sticking to her sweat-slick skin.

Fang is open, breezy, cooled by the wind that sweeps in over the waterfalls. Heart is warm in a way that feels alive, like the air itself crackles with the energy of a storm. She tries discreetly to wipe away the perspiration that clings to her brow and rolls down the nape of her neck, to emulate the cool ease with which her mother walks.

Virana looks as though the weather barely troubles her. She is unreadable, unshakeable, unmovable. She is everything Namaari is trying – and failing – to be.

But she cannot fail today.

Her mind is made up as they approach the bridge to Heart, equidistant from the other four congregations. She will do what is needed for her people, no matter what it takes. That much she is sure of.

At least until she spies the small figure next to the chief.

The girl cannot be much older than Namaari but she holds herself high, shoulders back and chin up, as though she is the chief instead of the older man standing beside her. She is poised in the way that Namaari’s mother is poised, with the kind of assured confidence that comes from knowing exactly who you are and what you’re meant to be.

She turns her head and catches Namaari’s eye.

For a brief second, her heart stutters in her chest.

The girl is shadowed in light, haloed around her head and glinting off the dark copper of her skin, but the smile she gives Namaari is more brilliant than the sun could ever be.

She steps out from behind her mother’s legs and smiles shyly back.

The chief is giving a speech and Namaari hears something about unity and peace, but the words seem far away, gone in wisps of smoke before she can reach them. There are complaints and mutterings in the crowd, but she does not notice them – she is fascinated by the chief’s daughter, as comfortable in this strange land as Namaari is discomfited.

Namaari has always been good at observing, but now the details come to her even without effort – the jade beads threaded through sun-bleached braids, the golden ring wrapped around the tight knot of hair, the way the girl moves as though she’s untethered to the ground.

She is so caught up in watching that she doesn’t realize the girl has reached her until she is standing in front of her with expectant eyes.

There is an outstretched hand in front of her, and a slight nudge at her side.

Namaari looks at her mother.

Virana’s face is placid, peaceful. She inclines her head at Namaari with a slight smile and gentle eyes, the fond look of a parent to their only child, but Namaari knows what she is really saying. 

_Remember what you came here to do._

The memory of her promise feels like a bad dream. Suddenly, Namaari wishes it could be.

She takes the girl’s hand, as calloused as her own, and as they dash giggling over the bridge to Heart, learns that her name is Raya.

Later, when her mother sets the broken shard of the dragon gem in her staff and lays a warm hand on Namaari’s shoulder, her victory tastes like ashes in her mouth.

xxx

The second time Namaari sees Raya, she is beautiful.

The girl standing before a skeleton with a glowing gem in her palms is unmistakably Raya and unmistakably not. The jade beads that once held her braids are gone, and her golden ring sits in Namaari’s pocket, leaving her hair to tumble loosely around a leaner and sharper face, streaked with sand from the desert.

Six years have passed since she last saw the chief’s daughter, and yet – even trapped in a cave with her bitterest enemy, having lost everything she’s ever known, Raya holds herself as upright as the first time Namaari set eyes on her. Silhouetted in light, dirty and dusty, Raya is as radiant as the sparkling stone wrapped protectively in her hands.

Namaari draws her swords.

They are both speaking but Namaari isn’t paying attention to the conversation, not really. She is tracking Raya, observing her in the way she has never been able to help, tracing over the muscled lines of her body and her worn-through clothes, threadbare in the way that fabric gets when it’s been washed too many times.

Namaari thinks of days gone by when she’d done the same thing, when money from the treasury had been too scarce to provide for the people, let alone the chief’s family. She forces herself to remember those days when Raya’s eyes narrow on her with hate, thinks of the hungry children in the villages and the shortages that plague her nation, one after another.

She thinks of the brief hours spent in Heart as she prepares to cut Raya down, a place drawn from the legends her mother had once sung her to sleep with. A nation whose people had never wanted, never lived without, never even known suffering. A place made joyous and prosperous by the dragon gem.

_What else could I have done?_ she wants to scream as Raya sends heavy, crushing earth down on them, swinging over them like the girl made of air she’d first met. _How else could I have saved my people?_

The memory of Heart, overflowing with abundance while her people withered away, crystallizes her heart like the shattered pieces of the dragon gem.

Raya can hate her.

It will never make a difference.

Namaari repeats it to herself as she gives chase, pounding down dusty canyons and winding roads wrapped around mountains. She chants it like a mantra, and when Raya escapes her by the quarter of a second, convinces herself that she believes it.

After all, she has always been good at lying.

xxx

The third time Namaari sees Raya, she is fierce.

Namaari has tracked her doggedly, followed her path over mountains and rivers and valleys. Raya is everywhere she turns, a shadow over her shoulder, a ghost fleeing in the night. She finds her finally in Spine, a land of deep forests and swirling mist, and as Raya emerges from the abandoned village, she gives the order to kill.

She does not think about the way the tendrils of fog cling to Raya’s raven hair, or how her eyes gleam burnished onyx in the glimmering white that surrounds them both. She does not think about Raya at all, because Namaari is her nation’s hope, and she will save them no matter what it takes.

_“So we’re both badass warrior women who prefer swords,”_ she said once in a world where maybe she and Raya could have been friends. In that world, this fight would have taken place in the grand atriums of her home in the capital of Fang, or on a sunny mountain top in the sweeping jungles of Heart. In that world, the clang of sword and staff would have been interspersed with laughter and joking taunts and calls of _watch out! on your left!_ In that world, they would have thrown themselves onto the ground after they were exhausted, giggling and whispering secrets into the night.

But on the day she broke the heart of the only friend she ever had and watched an ancient darkness return, she knew a world like that would never exist.

When they fight, they fight to kill.

The world narrows to a blur of wood and metal and mist. Namaari whirls and ducks and leaps and slashes and as long as she does not think about Raya, the snowy ground beneath her feet feels as familiar as being atop Serlot’s back, or training in the marble pavilions of Fang. She feels solid here, in this place where her swords flash like extensions of herself and her breath comes hard and fast and the thrill of fighting someone on her level spurs her on as swift as the wind.

She is lost to the battle and when she finally returns to herself, it is Raya’s cape that is bunched up in her hand and Raya’s face that awaits her clenched fist.

Dazed eyes, as dark as the midnight sky, blink up at her.

_“How could you do this to me?”_

Her hand wavers in the air.

Then there is a furious roar pulsing in her ears and Raya is ripped from her and all she can do is stand, frozen, because _this cannot be real –_

The dragon pauses in front of her.

For a heartbeat, she thinks this is it. She has incurred the wrath of an ancient beast, the last relic of a golden age, a being far older than her very existence. She will die in the clasp of this dragon’s jaws, and she cannot find that she regrets it, because somewhere inside her is the child flipping through numerous scrolls trying to find Sisu, and now she is _here._

Sisu looks at her long and slow, and her eyes are sad. Her eyes are like Raya’s.

She could capture the dragon right now. She could find Raya, too tired and beaten up to resist her, and get the pieces of the gem from her by force.

Instead Namaari stands still and watches the biggest dream of her life vanish into the mist.

xxx

The fourth time Namaari sees Raya, she is gentle. 

The dragon pendant digs into the palm of her hand as she reads the letter, fingertips scouring the looping scrawl of words. She has never seen Raya’s handwriting before, but it fits her – words dancing and leaping over the page like the girl who cannot stay still, the girl who always seems to walk with her feet hovering just off the ground.

A deal. Raya is offering her a chance.

Raya is offering her trust.

Again.

Namaari betrays her.

Again.

No surprise shows in Raya’s face but her eyes flicker with hurt and Namaari is twelve years old again, perched in a secret cavern in a faraway land with a girl who has never known pain or hurt or suffering and now understands all three.

The girl in front of her is no longer as naïve but she hunches slightly all the same, curling inward as if to protect herself from Namaari’s betrayal. Namaari tries to take solace in the fact that this time, at least, it will not cost Raya everything.

She is wrong, of course.

Namaari learns that an ancient, magical creature can die as easily as a rabbit caught in a trap.

Raya screams, lurching for the edge of the cliff, and it sounds like it has been wrenched from the depths of her soul and it is the worst thing Namaari has ever heard. Sisu slips beneath the surface of the water as cleanly and soundlessly as the sun dropping below the horizon, and then all is calm.

The last dragon is gone.

Namaari collapses.

She thinks of Sisu’s eyes on her, that gentle, patient gaze. She thinks of her own finger on the trigger of the crossbow, slippery and tense, wanting and not wanting in equal parts, torn between a hopeless wish for peace and burning loyalty to her people.

She wants to wail, to shriek, to rage and shake her fist at the storm-darkened sky. She wants her people to be happy and she wants the dream of her childhood and – strangely – she wants Raya to look at her the way she had the day they first met, before Namaari ruined everything.

She has no time to do any of those things, because then the world runs dry and the Druun descend.

Namaari is running before her mind has caught up, whistling for Serlot, and together she and her creature ride into the heart of the chaos.

Everything is falling apart before her eyes but Namaari has no time to look, to fix things. She races up the column of stairs, the stairs she’s climbed a thousand times up and down in training, the stairs she’s ascended and descended in pouring rain and burning sun, always to find her mother waiting at the top.

Virana waits for her, as she always has.

She always will, now. She will wait here for decades, centuries, eons. Cities will rise and fall, and the chief of Fang will never move from where she stands, clutching her sceptre before her throne.

Unreadable, unshakeable, unmovable.

Namaari lifts a shaking hand to the hardened curve of her mother’s cheek.

She thinks she should cry, but there are no tears to be found in the backs of her eyes, no lump in her throat. She wonders faintly if the Druun have taken her too, if she has turned to stone and there is no flesh and blood left in her body to feel.

She is still holding onto her mother’s statue when she hears the footsteps behind her.

Namaari doesn’t need to turn to know who it is.

Raya’s feet strike the marble hard, no longer as light and swift as the wind whispering through the trees, no longer dancing inches above the ground. Her girl of air, finally brought to earth by the force of her grief.

Raya’s father was taken by the Druun too, Namaari remembers as she turns to face her opponent. Namaari has lived with the loss of her mother for barely a turn of the sundial, but Raya has endured it for six years – endured it and still tried to trust the person who made it happen.

She knows as she sees the look on Raya’s face that there will be no third chances for her. She has taken Raya’s goodness and Raya’s kindness and Raya’s trust, taken and taken and given nothing in return. She will deserve her own destruction.

Namaari leaps from the dais and Raya rises to meet her, and they clash in the ruins of the end of the world.

This time, the fight offers no solace.

Namaari is unsteady, unable to ground herself, and her swords feel like clumsy attachments at the ends of her limbs, heavy and unwieldy. She is lost, unable to separate Raya from the girl slashing at her with vicious fury, and when Raya disarms her and holds the blade to her throat, it is choking numbness that bubbles up inside her. 

She has failed.

She has failed to protect her people. She has failed to protect the last dragon. She has failed to protect her mother. She has failed in absolutely everything and all of it – everything she has ever done to Raya – has been for nothing.

She spits awful, vindictive words at Raya, but it is herself she sees mirrored in those dark eyes, in the arm that rises to cut her down. She turns away and waits for the death blow.

It never comes.

When she opens her eyes, she is alone in the crumbling atrium.

xxx

The next time Namaari sees Raya, she does not see her coming.

Death hovers over them, a looming spectre waiting to snatch them up in gaping jaws. Namaari evades it with razor-sharp swiftness, sliding through hungry masses of Druun to hold up the gem and save Raya and her friends.

She has just enough time to whirl, to see the shock on Raya’s face, before the earth gives way under them and they slide into darkness.

Namaari knows that they are doomed but she will not yield to these monsters. She will die here but she will die fighting and the Druun can struggle to drag every last breath out of her if they wish to keep her. 

At least, that’s what she thinks until Raya walks over to her and places the gem shard in her hand.

She stares blankly as the other girl retreats, her eyes soft and trusting where they had once held bitter vengeance and hatred. She does not even have the time to scream before the Druun envelop Raya.

Something inside her cracks open.

The little sliver of chasm stretches wider as the little boy gives her his piece, then the baby, then the large man from Spine who looks as though he could crush her skull in his hands but holds the baby as tenderly as though she were the dragon gem itself.

Namaari is left alone with the writhing shadows of the Druun, and in her hands she holds the only hope of salvation for her future.

A shaft of light pierces through the dark.

Instinct alone sends her rushing for escape, clutching the pieces of the dragon gem – together at last – so tightly that it digs into her palms. She is scrambling over the rubble, the Druun parting in her wake, when something stills her hand.

She turns to look at the group below.

The last remnants of the sun fall directly on Raya’s statue, the pinnacle around which her friends gather, the shining beacon to which they cling. It illuminates the upturned curve of her cape, the solidified strands of her hair, the stone orbs of her eyes. 

Raya’s eyes, looking at her the way she had first looked at her, as though they were children again and the years between them had crumbled away to dust.

Finally, Namaari doesn’t have to make a choice. There is no choice to make.

Maybe there never was.

Namaari rushes back to the group of statues, to Raya, and scatters the pieces of gem on the rock. She pieces them together with shaking hands, and as she works, a thousand images flash through her head.

Raya’s friends, Spine and Talon and Tail, leaving their final hope for the world in the hands of the girl who had broken it.

Sisu, looking at her with sadness, with gentleness, with faith, as though she had never for one second doubted that Namaari would do the right thing.

Virana, her hand on Namaari’s shoulder and the pride in her voice, loving her people more than anything and showing it in all the wrong ways.

Raya, always Raya, the brush of her fingers against Namaari’s, the peace on her face as she gave up her life and trusted Namaari to bring it back.

She thinks of them all when she assembles the gem, but it is Raya’s face she remembers when she steps back into the embrace of the Druun, and Raya’s face she sees when she returns to her body, gasping, and knows that she has done it.

This time, it is she who smiles at Raya and Raya who smiles back, her face lighting up like the glow of the horizon at dawn. When Raya sets her hand atop Namaari’s, slight fingers curling around her wrist, Namaari’s heart stutters once more.

Afterwards, Raya finds her at the edge of the ruined atrium, legs swinging over the edge. She sits down beside her silently, and together they look up at the dragons still dancing far above, twirling and whirling and swooping through skies heavy with rain.

Finally, Namaari knows why Raya is her girl of air, what she has reminded her of all along.

She feels unsettled in this new world, in this place where five broken nations are working and talking and laughing alongside one another as they help rebuild, where the dragons of old have returned and the Druun will soon fade to a distant memory. She must find her footing again but she thinks that she doesn’t mind – that she might actually like making the path ahead of her as she walks it.

Raya clears her throat.

“So, um, I know that you have a lot of rebuilding to do here but I was wondering if, maybe, you wanted to come back with me. To Heart, I mean.”

Namaari turns to look at her. Raya is stunning in the morning light, weak rays of sun gilding the line of her jaw and the curve of her cheekbone, lightening her hair to shining bronze. For a split second, Namaari wants to memorize all of it, paint scrolls of Raya in the morning and afternoon and night and study them all.

She shakes her head to dismiss the thought and tries not to think about how it makes the nape of her neck feel hot and flushed. Raya’s words register in her head.

“To Heart?” she echoes. _Why would you want me back there?_

She doesn’t actually ask the question, but they can both hear it.

Raya squares her shoulders and lifts her chin, and Namaari feels as though she is caught between the past and the present, between the little girl who had held herself as proudly as any chief and the bold, fierce woman Raya will become.

“Because my dad was right, and I want him to see it. His dream.”

Then she smiles a little shyly and tucks her hair behind her ear. “Also, because…well, you said once that we could have been friends in a different world and now we’ve made one.”

She reaches out a hand.

This time, Namaari does not think about battle plans or dragon gems or her people. She does not think of two hopeless wishes that can never be because they have forged the world together, and in this place where dragons spiral around each other like fluttering ribbons, she can have both.

Raya’s hand is both familiar and strange in her own, the rough pads of her fingertips scraping against Namaari’s knuckles, more calloused than Namaari remembers from before. Raya tugs her up and off the edge of the stone and runs, hand still clasped firmly in hers, and Namaari learns the new scraped and toughened places of Raya’s palms as they sprint together.

They cross the bridge to Fang, teasing and joking with each other, and as they enter their shining new world, the sound of Raya’s laughter feels like a promise.

Years later, Namaari will tell groups of awed children as Raya facepalms behind her, _that was the moment I knew I loved this woman._

xxx

The last time Namaari sees Raya, she is everything.

Raya is glowing and beautiful and fierce and gentle and Namaari will never need to count the times she sees her again, because she will see her every day for the rest of their lives together. She speaks the words she has wanted to say for years and Raya says them back, and when they kiss Namaari knows that she has come home.

Then they are off, Raya on Tuk-Tuk and Namaari on Serlot, and together the world is theirs. They stay in Fang and in Heart, and they visit each of their friends in Spine and Talon and Tail (and Sisu – they are dragon nerds, after all) and when Kumandra grows too small for them, they journey into what lies beyond.

The years pass and every time Namaari sees Raya, it is like seeing her for the first time again. She loses count of every sunrise and sunset spent with her wife, every land they visit and every injustice they right. There are fights – there will always be fights with Raya – and sometimes it is them together, battling with sword and spear and staff against those who would bring discord back into the world, and sometimes it is against each other, but it doesn’t take long before Raya whispers _cat lady_ and Namaari shoots back _dragon nerd,_ and they are home once more.

Soon, word spreads of the badass women warriors who fight with matching swords, who brought the dragons back into the world, and they become awed whispers in marketplaces, stories whispered around fires at night. Tales pass into folklore and folklore passes into myth and, long after Raya and Namaari have left – together, as always – myth passes into legend.

All legends hold a kernel of truth, they say. If that is so, no one has ever quite been able to get at the truth of this one.

Many have tried, of course. There have been a thousand iterations of the legend of Raya and Namaari, and every one of them spins a different moral of the fable: of the power of destiny, the power of unity, the power of two star-crossed lovers from enemy nations who defied the odds to be together.

But if Raya and Namaari could have heard, they would have spun a different story – one that began long before love, before passion, before destiny.

A story of one little girl who trusted another and, in doing so, saved the world.


End file.
